Combining economics (the theory of means) with
moral theory (in particular, a Millian theory of ends) yields a
comprehensive analysis of value that turns on the lights in what had
been dark rooms of unresolved and unconsidered problems in economics
and moral theory. My discoveries in this area are the subject of the
economics Ph.D. I am writing entitled "Economics and the Theory of
Ends." Along the way I have also taken the opportunity to publish
many bits of my magnum opus in short essay form, primarily in
The Stanford Review. I have learned to appreciate the essay
form. When ways are found to separate out parts of a whole into
essays it demonstrates how each part is capable of standing on its
own, so that when they all fit together the result is not just a
single whole that might stand or fall together but a single whole
that can only stand because no part can fall. Plus, essays are fun,
the better to reach enough people to win the political battles that
must be won to secure these advances for posterity. The dissertation
I write for Stanford university. The following compilation of essays
is what I write for We the People. It is my Federalist Papers,
ultimately advocating a small series of amendments to the U.S.
Constitution that will make us a much richer, freer, safer country,
with greatly increased opportunity for all.

The essays fall into four volumes: Liberty,
Utilitarianism, Non-ideal Theory and The Decentralized Coordination
of Intelligence. To explain this structure requires some introduction
to ends and means, starting with economics.

Economics has been developed almost entirely as a
theory of means. Given a set of ends, optimal pursuit of these ends
(as studied by the economic theory of means) yields behavior. The
behavior of multiple agents can then be combined to yield markets and
other social behavior. Notice that this theory of behavior depends,
not just on the theory of how optimally to pursue given ends, but
also on the ends pursued. How then could it even be possible for
economics to develop primarily as a theory of means, while neglecting
ends, as I am claiming? How have economists been able to separate the
theory of means from the theory of ends while still generating a
theory of behavior? The answer is: by a remarkable bit of
serendipity.

It is possible to use all-purpose means, like
money and leisure, as proxies for ultimate ends without having to say
anything about ultimate ends themselves. In particular, market
behavior can largely be described in terms of the pursuit of all
purpose means. That is what markets and the division of labor are
about after all. We pursue many of our ultimate ends indirectly, by
producing things that are of value to others and then trading, and
this is enabled and mediated by the liquidity that money and trade
provide. Thus the subject matter of economics narrowly defined --
participation in markets -- can largely be studied without needing to
develop a theory of ends, and this is what has been done.

This is only a small part, however, of what the
economic theory of means is needed for. There are many spheres where
ultimate ends are pursued directly rather than through the proximate
goal of all purpose means. Most importantly, the proper sphere of
government is delimited as just those areas where markets are not
able to efficiently coordinate private interests. Here the economic
theory of means is more needed than anywhere else, precisely because
we cannot turn the job over to markets. We must figure out for
ourselves how to efficiently pursue ends in these areas. But until we
make progress in articulating ends, especially public ends, the
theory of means cannot be applied. Economic science sits idly by its
most important task because we have failed to tackle the other half
of the analysis of value: the theory of ends.

As it turns out it is possible to develop the
theory of ends and make it every bit as rigorous as the mathematics
of constrained optimization employed by the theory of means. John
Stuart Mill blazed the trail 150 years ago, only to be systematically
misunderstood ever since. Mill's idea (from his Art of Life,
the last book of his System of Logic) was that, just a there is a
science of the nature of things, so too there is a science of the
value of things, and both proceed by following the implications of
reason for how to follow and marshall evidence. So long as we husband
(properly account and follow) all information we discover about what
there is to value in the world, we can make progress in discovering
the value of things just as we can make progress in discovering the
nature of things. Following the Millian idea that there is a science
of following evidence of value, one discovers some conclusions about
value that anyone who follows the implications of reason for how to
follow evidence must arrive at. These fundamental conclusions about
where value lies and what matters more than what then allow us to
apply the theory of means to arrive at some basic principles that
people who follow right reason must want to obey. We get a foundation
for principles of liberty (volume I) and for embracing a particular
concept of Millian utilitarianism (volume II) which encompasses
interpersonal tradeoffs and hence the questions of justice which
matters of policy and law necessarily involve.

Each of these volumes begins with the theory of
ends, deducing some spartan conclusions about ends to which the
theory of means is then applied. The bulk of each volume is devoted
to developing these applications. The purpose of having separate
volumes is to keep track of what implications from the theory of
means depend on what conclusions from the theory of ends. The
argument for utilitarianism rests on more extensive conclusions from
the theory of ends than the arguments for liberty do so it comes
second. Both of these volumes fall under the heading of ideal theory.
They trace the implications of right reason for ends and means. The
Non-ideal Theory volume (perhaps I should call it error
theory) uses these implications of right reason as a benchmark for
tracing the consequences of violating right reason in archetypical
ways. An analysis of value that proceeds from error follows a path
that can be compared to a correct analysis. At each point the errant
analysis of value generates its own directives for how to proceed
which may send those who follow this path either farther away from
what a correct analysis would urge, or back towards a correct
analysis. Some divergences from correct analysis are
self-reinforcing, achieving a perverse stability--a double bind of
error. Some are innocuous. One fatal error turns out to be
equalitarianism: treating equality as an end (which is equivalent to
embracing envy). This should not be too surprising, after a century
that has seen communism ravage half the world and unlimited
government debilitate the rest. Yet even these burdens were not
enough to keep the power of liberty from pulling the world into a
whole new age of invention and prosperity. It is right that has the
might, but no one should underestimate the harm that wrong reason can
produce or the havoc it is still wreaking today. Understanding the
anatomy of error is an important key to combatting it and it turns
out that we can make a science of divergences from right reason, just
as we can make a science of the implications of right
reason.

The last volume, The Decentralized Coordination
of Intelligence, takes up an invention which I was elated to
think was my own, until I discovered that others have been working on
it for twenty years, which makes me even happier, because puts it
that much closer to fruition. The invention is a scheme for mediating
the decentralized coordination of intelligence, analagous to the
decentralized coordination of productive activity mediated by
markets. It is a calculational scheme for extracting the pattern of
overlap between different people's judgements of value, then
projecting this pattern of overlap to predict how any one person will
rate or value any item based on how others have valued it. This
ratintg engine or prediction engine, developed as an interned
utility, will allow all to act as each other's eyes and ears while
empowering individual judgement. Nothing is more valuable than
accurate guidance about where, according to one's own judgement,
one's time and other resources would best be spent. The rating engine
will be the mechanism through which the information revolution's
flood of information is directed. The technology is already in use,
but it is a critical mass technology that is being tried in lots of
separate non-communicating niches, keeping it from catching fire. I'm
predicting that in ten more years we'll all be acting as each other's
eyes and ears. The technological possibility of a decentralized
coordination of intelligence is a powerful complement to the
mechanisms of policy and law discussed in the preceeding volumes.
Where law can only attack monopoly in its grossest manifestations and
with the brutal club of regulation, the decentralized coordination of
intelligence will smash the information assymetries upon which
countless small bastions of monopoly power depend. The rating engine,
as an engine for collecting and disseminating judgements of value,
will also serve as an engine of justice, directing credit (and
remuneration) where credit is due.

You can continue from here to read the volume
introductions below, or you can click directly to the
articles.

Agency requires liberty. Only through liberty can
people follow their evidence of value so as to make progress in the
discovery and pursuit of valued ends. Thus all value necessarily
flows through liberty. Whether the ultimate source of value be
religious or mundane, it is only meaningful if embraced through
liberty of conscience and can only be empowered by liberty of action.
This is the founding understanding of what has come to be called
liberal political and moral philosophy: the philosophies that guided
the rise of liberty and democracy in western civilization.

The framers of the U.S. Constitution were radical
partisans of liberty. They saw all all good flowing from liberty and
uncoerced private agreement and they saw government, the embodiment
of force, as a sometimes necessary evil, to be empowered only
where necessary. To a man they were what today would be called "gun
nuts." If they were alive now we would almost certainly have to
restrain them from trying to "water the tree of liberty with blood"
when they saw how their carefully crafted system of limited
government has been turned into a system of unlimited government
through FDR's perversion of the commerce clause (in direct violation
of the clear language of the Constitution). After sixty years of
unlimited government we have become oblivious to the priority of
liberty -- our founding understanding. We not only violate the
necessity test for government, we have turned our government over to
people who presumptively detest liberty and trust government, who
believe that our economic system of liberty (capitalism) is
fundementally corrupt and government is the fount of value and
morality.

We need a rebirth of radical belief in liberty. We
need to understand what was once understood and we need to go
forward, to understand better than the founders did how we can make
liberty work for us. This volume of essays first lays the groundwork
for this progress by developing the arguments for liberty from within
the theory of ends. From there, the implications of liberty can be
systematically spun out through the theory of means.

Very briefly, the argument for liberty from within
the theory of ends runs as follows. Efficient pursuit of ends is for
naught if ends are not worth pursuing, and progress in discovering
what ends are worth pursuing depends on being free to follow and
marshall evidence of value. Liberty, both for discovering and
pursuing ends, is the great engine of value in the world. It takes
quite a few pages to pin down exactly what priority of liberty can be
deduced as a matter of right -- as a priority that everyone who obeys
the requirements of reason for how to follow and marshall evidence of
value will necessarily come to embrace -- but it can indeed be done,
and it turns out to establish a particular articulation of J. S.
Mill's principle of liberty, employing many of Mill's arguments and
clarifying some things that have often been thought to be problematic
about Mill's formulation.

My deduction of John Stuart Mill's principle of
liberty from within the theory of ends is contained in the
Utilitarianism
and Slaveryarticle. Where most
of the articles in these volumes are short journalistic pieces,
Utilitarianism and Slavery is a lengthier academic article,
written for a compilation of perspectives on slavery that a friend of
mine (Tommy Lott) was editing. I am unsure of the status of the
collection at present but this is an excellent article. It is
relevant both to the argument for liberty and to the argument for
utilitarianism in the next volume. The following is the abstract I
suggested for the volume's introductory essay:

Alec Rawls's Utilitarianism and
Slavery uses the issue of slavery to resolve the seeming
incompatibility between utilitarianism and indefeasible rights.
The key is to couple utilitarianism with a theory of ends, an
innovation pioneered by John Stuart Mill. The earlier, Benthamite,
version of utilitarianism, since it places no restrictions on
ends, cannot deduce any restrictions on means. That is, no limits
can be placed on what such a utilitarianism would call for. In
particular, it might call for any proposed right to be violated.
But as soon as something can be said about what there is to value
or what matters more than what, as a Millian theory of ends is
able to do, that places restrictions on what can possibly be a
part of a maximizing pursuit of ends. We might be able to assert,
given what we can say about value, that violation of certain
principles will always decrease the sum of utilities. These
principles could be rights, which would then be indefeasible under
Millian utilitarianism.

Rawls uses this method to construct an argument
for basic liberty rights. He gives a modern interpretation of
Mill's theory of ends in terms of rationality then shows how the
arguments Mill made for his principle of liberty can be seen to
derive directly from his theory of ends. Thus if a person accepts
priorities which, according to the theory of ends, every rational
person must accept, he will want to abide by Mill's principle of
liberty. From there it is trivial to deduce that, under Millian
utilitarianism, Mill's principle of liberty articulates
indefeasible liberty rights, since anything that maximizes each
person's utility must maximize the sum of utilities.

Unfortunately, Mill's principle of liberty is
very limited in scope. It only addresses cases where there is
conflict between what Mill called "direct" and "indirect"
interests. If there are direct interests on both sides then Mill's
principle places no restrictions on what outcomes will maximize
the sum of utilities. Since slaves and slaveowners have
conflicting direct interests in whether slavery is allowed, Mill's
principle establishes no right not to be enslaved. This is a
glaring lack. Rawls shows how it can be remedied by extending the
conclusions that can be reached through the theory of ends about
what rational people must value more than what. On the basis of
these conclusions it can then be deduced that slavery must reduce
the sum of utilities, implying that under utilitarianism there is
an indefeasible right not to be enslaved. The conclusions that
must be accepted about what rational people must value more than
what in order to reach this utilitarian conclusion are suprisingly
undemanding: people must only reject the anti-social sentiments
(envy and spite).

The argument for a right not to be enslaved is the
first step in establishing economic liberty rights more generally.
The most general statement would be that the priority of liberty
applies the same to economic liberty as to other liberties. That is,
in order to satisfy the Millian utilitarian public interest test
(which understands that all value flows through liberty) infringments
of liberty must first of all aim at making liberty work (effectively
increasing the sum of liberty), or else they must be necessary to the
achievement of what can be clearly established to be greater
utilitarian concerns (a very high hurdle).

With an articulated ideal of liberty in hand and
its priority established we can turn to the question of means. What
does the priority of liberty imply about how we should act? For one,
it turns out that the ability to articulate the ideal of liberty is
just what is needed to enable efficient protection of liberty. Notice
that liberty can be protected in one of two ways: either directly, by
articulating the full scope of what is not to be criminalized, or
indirectly, by designing restrictions on law enforcement that try to
impede the prosecution of certain sorts of behaviors. Our own system
of liberty is primarily indirect. Only the first two amendments
articulate any protected activities. The rest of the bill of rights
imposes procedural restrictions on the police and the
courts.

Indirect protection of liberty is clearly less
efficient than direct protection. It necessarily casts too large a
net, impeding the prosecution of all criminal behaviors, instead of
just those that are not properly punishable. Also, activities that
ought to be protected are left vulnerable to prosecution, in those
instances where the impediments to investigation do not block the
activity from view. Indirect protection of liberty is not good for
liberty or for crime control. But direct protection of liberty was
not an option in 1786. Direct protection requires an articulation of
the full ideal of liberty -- something the founders did not possess.
Mill's On Liberty was not published until 1859, and clarification and
proof of Mill's principle of liberty has not been available until
now. With an articulated full ideal of liberty in hand, we can switch
from indirect to direct protection of liberty. On the one hand, this
would give us much better protection of liberty. At the same time,
many restrictions on the courts and the police could be eliminated,
giving us much better protection from crime.

In 1991 I wrote a series of Stanford Review
articles on the relaxations of restrictions on crime control would be
enabled by direct protection of liberty. Here I have collected them
under the heading Reframing
our System of
Liberty.

How to Safely
Decimate Crime offers a whole other
scheme for reducing the conflict between liberty and crime control,
this time by correcting a problem with the "beyond a reasonable
doubt" standard of guilt used in criminal cases. This article could
also be logically placed in the Non-ideal Theory volume, since it
looks at how forcing people to employ a standard that violates the
requirements of moral reason causes the system to malfunction.
Modifying the system so that jurors hand down two verdicts--guilty or
not guilty according to a certainty standard and guilty or not guilty
according to a less than certainty standard--allows us to much more
effectively catch and punish the guilty while presenting much less
risk to the innocent. If residual doubt about guilt is so important
that we are willing to compromise our entire system of criminal law
to defend against it, we should obviously be distinguishing between
cases where it is and is not present!

The next couple of essays in this volume are
occasional pieces that help flesh out the case for economic liberty.
The
Priority of Liberty is a rabble
rousing essay on liberty in general and economic liberty in
particular that I wrote for for one of the Review's yearly
curriculum issues. What the left denigrates as rule by capital
(capitalism) is properly understood as our economic system of
liberty. Contempt for capitalism is contempt for liberty. Put it on a
bumper-sticker: "Every violation of the priority of liberty is an
increment of communism."

Monopoly
Capital offers an etiology of the
counter-culture's ironic embrace of unlimited government. Pervasive
government regulation of the economy raises serious barriers to entry
in every industry that can only be overcome with serious economic
backing. Government has become the great source of monopoly power in
America, greatly favoring the haves over the have nots. How did this
come about? Through the counter-culture's perverted view of economic
liberty. The illiberalism that calls itself liberal believes that
economic liberty must have its power controlled and siphoned off by
government if it is to become a force for good. Thus have the
illiberals become the architects of their original bogeyman: monopoly
capital.

One of the keys to protecting the priority of
liberty is to recognize that the Ninth Amendment, with its
declaration of "unenumerated rights retained by The People,"
inevitably calls for protection of the "inalienable rights" of the
Declaration of Independence, which call for a general protection of
liberty. It is an outrage that the self-proclaimed "sweet land of
liberty" has tolerated an egregious history of Supreme Court
interpretation devoid of any general protection of for liberty
whatsoever. Hand in hand with a general protection of liberty under
the Ninth Amendment the Court should wake up to the fact that the due
process clause of the Fifth Amendment calls for a general prohibition
on prior-restraint. In cowardly evasion of the Ninth Amendment the
Court has used the due process clause to improperly ground its
unguided stabs at unenumerated rights, doing great damage to both
unenumerated rights and the due process clause. In the name of
liberty, we need to get these constitutional protections right.
A Tenable
Concept of Substantive Due Process
shows how.

One of the outstanding examples of the priority of
liberty in action is gun rights. One of the egregious examples of
prior-restraint is gun control. The question isn't what kind of guns
are good or bad, it is who should have them, and the answer is easy:
Disarm
Criminals, not Law Abiding
Citizens.All criminalogical logic and
evidence supports gun rights, as does the Constitution. Another
example where the Constitution gets the priority of liberty right
while those illiberals who call themselves "liberal" get it
wrong.

For a historical account of how far we have
betrayed our Constitution, see Limited
Government.Written on the eve of the
'96 presidential elections, it traces how the system of limited
government was overthrown by FDR's perversion of the commerce clause
and identifies the more than half of modern government that is
clearly unconstitutional, the huge error that this overthrow
consitutes, and the partisanship of the candidates on this issue. "If
fifty million of us pull the same trigger this Tuesday, we can kill
the blob."

The enemies of liberty are always looking for any
way to attack economic liberty as unjust, providing them a populist
means to impose an increment of communist dictatorship via tyranny of
the majority. Affirmative action is a perfect example. But
The
Answer to Racism is Liberty, not Socialist Affirmative
Action. Affirmative action, by
burdening hiring and promotion processes with racial liability, makes
it more costly for employers to take a chance on an employee and thus
increases the incentives for employers to prejudge candidates,
exactly the conditions under which group differences can lead to
individual injustice. Anti-discrimination law exacerbates race based
injustice. Liberty solves it.

I have written a host of other articles on "victim
studies" and the politics of group identity. Since analysis of these
movements involves dissecting violations of moral reason, these
articles appear in the Non-ideal
Theory volume.

The triumph of the Democrats in 98 mid-term
elections calls for a post-mortem. On virtually every issue it
is the Republicans who are defending the priority of liberty and the
Democrats who are attacking it (except where they are both attacking
it). The winning Republican campaign would be to expose Democrat
illiberalism but the Republicans cannot do this when they are busy
charging the Democrats with being "too liberal." Hamstrung by
language they instead try to avoid the issues, like Dole in '96, and
lose, even though the issues are squarely on their side. The solution
is easy: Stop
Calling Illiberalism "Liberal."

Using words properly would also foster a
recognition that on most issues religous conservatives are
definitively liberal partisans of limited government. On those issues
where religous conservatives are not liberal they really ought to be
because, on close inspection, The
Bible is a Liberal Document, clearly
articulating the principles of limited government, including in
reference to the unborn.

The logical progression from ends to means
suggests that this volume should begin with some further deductions
about the implications of right reason for ends, followed by some
implications that this content to higher ends has for the effective
pursuit of ends. But there is an opportunity here to employ the
advantages of the essay form. While information about ends generally
will imply restrictions on what can possibly be a part of optimal
means, the theory of effective means can also have implications all
on its own. In Billing
Aid to Account a policy of billing aid
to the account of the recipient is seen to yield the most bang
(amount of aid afforded) per buck spent. Whatever kind or amount of
aid a fully grounded analysis says that society should give, this is
the way it should be given. Standing alone, it is a piece of the
puzzle. Ultimately one wants to put all the pieces together, but the
pieces are often coherent before being placed into the whole. Putting
things "out of order" sometimes reveals more by clarifying this
independence.

The simple device of billing aid to account
(instead of giving it away) offers vast benefits. It eliminates what
has been thought to be an insurmountable conflict between the liberal
goal of giving aid and the conservative goal of not creating
dependence, offering a way to keep incentives for such private
behavior as childbearing fully in line with social costs without
denying aid or infringing on liberty. Further, it provides a general
scheme for automatically eliminating inefficient government spending.
Those who would be the beneficiaries of government largess would now
get billed for it, and since government is inherently inefficient,
the value of the services rendered would generally be less than the
cost to the recipient, except in those rare cases that define the
proper role of government (where for some reason private agreements
are not able to reap an efficiency that collective action can).
Instead of clamoring for government largess, constituents would
clamor to be unburdened of it.

Returning to the logical progression from ends to
means, a next deduction that can be drawn from the theory of ends is
a value or priority of mutuality. As people see things to value in
the world, reason requires that they account each discovery of value
wherever it is at stake. In particular, when people who are fully
rational (who abide by the requirements of reason and evidence in
arriving at ends as well as means) see things to value in other
people and in the world outside of themselves, they will henceforth
account that value. Reason requires both that people look for value
(that they follow evidence of value), and that they conserve it when
they find it: that they love everything there is to love in the
world. It is these implications of moral reason (or full rationality)
that lead to the embrace of mutuality. We saw above that the priority
of liberty is grounded in process (people need liberty to discover
and pursue value). The value of mutuality, on the other hand, is
primarily a matter of substance, of what people who follow evidence
of value find that there is to value in the world. What they find is
that most of what there is to value lies outside of themselves. Thus,
turning to the theory of means, they find that the way to pursue the
most value is by pursuing cooperation, where they can get rewarded
for making a contribution to the people and purposes they can see to
care about. Only in this way can they reconcile their deepest goals:
to secure their own lives, and to devote their lives to what they
have found that is worth living for. Thus fully rational people will
necessarily want to interact with others on terms that are mutually
productive and abide by the obligations that they enter into.
Violating mutuality requires betraying what one can see to value. One
would be, in one's own eyes, a force of evil, which a person who sees
a world full of things to value cannot abide.

Looked at another way, securing one's own life is
not an end in itself. The question is: since our lives will be spent,
what is life worth spending on? One will not want to violate the
purposes of life in order to secure life. It is not always efficient
to pursue ultimate ends through the proximate goal of all purpose
means. We must always look at the price. When should we be spending
life instead of hoarding it? That dividing line is the principle of
mutuality. A person who has learned to love what there is to love in
the world insists on being a positive force, on making a contribution
and getting rewarded for that, rather than seeking to steal, to take
without giving. Of course, many people do seek to take without
giving. They have no preference for making a contribution, but feel
anything given to others as a loss to themselves. They are called
criminals, and the criminally minded. They have not followed evidence
of value to a discovery of what there is to value in the world, but
those who are fully rational -- who do follow evidence of value and
in this way abide by the implications of reason for ends as well as
means -- do find a world outside of themselves of things to value and
consequently embrace mutuality.

With this priority for mutuality in hand, the next
question is what are its implications for means. There is a
compelling line of analysis that leads from the priority of mutuality
to the embrace of Millian utilitarianism (the greatest sum of
attainment of progress in the discovery and pursuit of value) as a
general criterion of right. Thus the implications of mutuality are
vast. It implies everything that Millian utilitarianism implies.

The route from mutuality to Millian utilitarianism
can be navigated by borrowing some elements from John Rawls's
Theory of Justice , as discussed in The Argument for
Utilitarianism (being revised and presently unavailable). Rawls's
theory parlays a concept of "fairness" into a social decision
mechanism for choosing principles of justice. His concept of fairness
is pretty much exactly the concept of mutuality that can be deduced
from the theory of ends. When fairness is grounded in the theory of
ends the implications are for the most part identical to what Rawls
arrives at. One significant difference, however, is that the
criterion for choosing principles of justice becomes Millian
utilitarianism. In other words, if this way of grounding Rawls's
analytical construction makes for correct moral theory, then we have
a proof that Millian utilitarianism is the correct criterion of
right. Rawls saw himself as rejecting utilitarianism, but Millian
utilitarianism is a very special animal which I believe avoids the
criticisms that Rawls levels at utilitarianism more generally. Also,
the theory would still be a contract theory, as Rawls's theory is,
only with a reinterpretation of the criterion for arriving at an
agreeable contract.

The Argument for Utilitarianism, Some
Addenda is also under revision and presently
unavailable.

Moving on to the implications of Millian
utilitarianism, A
Balanced Budget Amendment attempts to
deduce a fully optimized tax structure. If we can determine what the
tax structure should be we don't want to leave it in the hands of
Congress, who can only do worse. We should put it into the
Constitution, stripping Congress of all tax power, thereby stripping
Congress of fully half of its opportunities for
corruption.

This complements the billing of aid to account,
which curtails corruption on the spending side by forcing recipients
to pay for government largess, making it unattractive. This scheme of
billing aid to account would be incorporated into the balanced budget
amendment. Also on the spending side, there is another powerful step
that can be taken to curtail corruption. We could require that all
legislation be able to pass a public interest test. This was the
dream of the English Radicals who founded utilitarianism: to
establish a public interest test that can be used to eliminate
corruption and stupidity from the law. With a secure foundation for
Millian utilitarianism in place, this test is now within reach.
Indeed, one might say it is already called for by the Constitution,
where the tax power is stated pursuant to "the common defense and
general welfare of the United States." All that remains is to specify
a "general welfare" test. At the very least, we should want the
courts to throw out any legislation that certainly flunks the Millian
public interest test, which alone would eliminate half of our current
federal government.

Stripping Congress of the bulk of its
opportunities for corruption solves one of the most difficult
conflicts that democracy faces: the irreducible conflict between free
speech rights and political corruption. If money wins campaigns, then
democracy is for sale, but campaign finance laws, by restricting how
people are allowed to spend money on campaign related speech, by
their nature restrict speech. Europe has chosen the path of
socialized speech, but as Richard Epstein has noted (Utah Law Review,
V.95, #3), the best way to resolve this conflict is to minimize it,
by taking opportunities for corruption away from Congress. The most
important step here is what Epstein describes: giving over to
individual liberty what liberty can do better than the state. That
still leaves us with a sizable government, but billing aid to
account, imposing a public interest test and putting the tax
structure in the Constitution would eliminate most remaining
opportunities for corruption. Those with corrupt tendencies would
find little in politics to attract them and we might actually get
good government.

One question that Millian utilitarianism itself
cannot solve is which form of Millian utilitarianism to employ,
average utilitarianism or total utilitarianism. There is only a
difference between these two on questions of population control.
Luckily, it turns out that the question of how to set population
policy can be answered through the theory of means. We want to set
incentives for responsible childbearing by requiring those who choose
to bear children to bear the full social costs. This can be
accomplished by using microeconomic taxes to internalize
externalities (part of the balanced budget proposal), billing aid to
account, and then leaving parents free to choose. I mentioned this
scheme in the earlier article Billing Aid to Account, and I elaborate
it in the next couple of articles, starting with:

Institutions
of Liberty Require Immigration
Crackdown. A nation's population is
determined both by its internal vital statistice and by its
immigration policies. To be able to answer claims of need, a society
must secure a basic level of prosperity, which requires attention to
population. On the immigration side, this means focussing immigration
on those that will lift society's production function more than they
move us out along it into diminishing returns. Responsible population
policy will allow us to bolster prosperity, especially at the bottom
of the economic ladder. This is crucial because economic duress can
constitute a kind of coercion, undermining the presumption of free
choice that underpins instutions of liberty and individual
responsibility. An example is occupational hazards. If choices are in
a moral sense freely chosen, in that all have tenable minimum
alternatives, then a person's choice of hazard for pay need not and
should not be regulated, allowing OSHA and its ilk to be eliminated,
or reduced to an informational role. We should be making it as easy
as possible for people to get a leg up on life: to make their
contribution and get rewarded for it. Liberty and responsibility
(including reproductive responsibility) are the keys.

Unfortunately, those most concerned about
population -- the environmentalists -- are dominated by irrational
socialist ideologies and alarmism. Where we need to start pricing
environmental damage correctly, bringing the environment into the
price system, the environmentalists are strenously insisting that the
environment cannot be priced at all. The consequence of this leftist
foolishness is unheeded environmental destruction. The
environmentalists have become like the Al Sharpton's and the Jesse
Jackson's of the world who are constantly trying to inflame racial
animosity in order to feed off of it. Getting population policy right
will require overcoming the lunacy of the environmental left,
epitomized by the frantic alarmism of Stanford Biology Professor Paul
Ehrlich, which I dissect in an in a little piece of unexpected truth
entitled: Exploit
Endangered Species

To complete the structure of correct incentives
for responsible childbearing it is necessary to account the fact that
making a baby takes two people. How should incentives be divided
between the mother and father? In answering this question one is
forced to ask an unexpected question: Are
Feminists Really Pro-Choice?

Any discussion of population policy must also come
to grips with the contentious subject of abortion.The analysis of
abortion rights can be sorted out by considering it in the context of
other life and death questions. I develop the exercise in in
Wrongful
Death, an inquirey into the propriety
of imposing the death penalty for infanticide, as was recently
considered by the State of New Jersey.

Addressing population clears up the foundational
questions but leaves a panopoly of various public policy questions
still to address.

Socialized
Medicine Still Looms was written on
the eve of the '94 mid-term elections, when the Republicans had just
by the skin of their teeth managed to beat back Hillary Clinton's
attempt to socialize one seventh of the U.S. economy. This article
describes how medical markets could work if we would only let
them.

Ideal
Democracy and the Mountain Bike is a
riff on how democracy is supposed to work. Regard for each others
concerns (as exemplified by the embrace of mutuality that underlies
principles of justice) leads automatically to limitation of
government intrusiveness and heavy handedness.

Liberal moral theory can be divided into two
parts: ideal theory and non-ideal theory. "Ideal theory" is the study
of how to correctly analyze the concepts of right, good and moral
worth. (It is called "liberal" because the defining discoveries of
enlightenment thought had to do with the priority that must be given
to liberty if people, and the societies they constitute, are to
advance in their discovery and pursuit of value.) Ideal theory is the
substance of volumes one and two of this dissertation on moral
science -- the volumes on Liberty and Utilitarianism.

Using ideal theory as a benchmark, it is possible
to pursue "non-ideal theory," which follows the implications of
various violations of the requirements of moral reason, tracing how
the conclusions that stem from incorrect moral thinking progressively
diverge from the conclusions of ideal theory.

In an ideal world, non-ideal theory would just be
interesting esoterica. In our world, there are monstrous engines of
error deeply entrenched throughout our culture, especially in
academia. Exposing and neutralizing these engines of error is one of
the great tasks now before mankind. It can be very difficult because
mistakes about what is right can cause people to devote themselves
tenaciously and often selflessly to error in the belief that they are
doing good. The hope is that this conciet can be appealed to: "make
it real, follow your proclaimed concern for right, and see the evil
it shows you have embraced." If you like horror movies, this will be
your favorite volume.

Libertarianism
vs. Equalitarianism. The structure of
non-ideal theory is revealed in the contrast between libertarianism
and equalitarianism. These two systems of moral thinking make similar
formal mistakes (both treat a means as an end), yet one turns out to
be benign and the other malignant. The reason why takes us to the
heart of moral understanding. We see what kind of strength morality
has: what it can overcome, and what mortally wounds it. Knowing what
kills, we know what must be stopped.

Some of the most systematic violations of the
requirements of thinking straight occur in typical religious and
anti-religious views. On the one hand, faith and belief violate
honest reason, dismissing possibilities that one has not the grounds
to dismiss (the possibility that what one takes on faith may not be
true). On the other hand, the moral implications of the possibility
of a God are independent of whether there really is a God. The
possibility reveals things about where value lies, and value, however
discovered, must be conserved. Religion is an important contemplation
for everyone. Moral science says so. See Religion
Within the Limits of Reason.

Interestingly, the life of Christ according to the
gospels can be powerfully interpretted as strictly adherant to the
requirements of honest reason. Christ
and Antichrist shows how. Following
the trail leads to an interpretation of original sin as biased
reason, and an understanding that the proper place for faith is in
honest reason, or truth.

Krugman
Equalitarian critiques a typical
egregious example of biased reason in the service of moral
error.

Ehrlich
Equalitarian poses the question of why
Paul Ehrlich remains wedded to his errant analysis of population
control, urging exactly those people who should be having children
not to. Is it because he has been seduced by equalitarianism, or is
he is just another grim reaper like Jack Kevorkian (who at least has
a legitimate cause, even if he is a ghoul).

Lastly is a series of articles analyzing the three
great infestations of equalitarian error that constitute the politics
of group identity: the victim approaches to race, feminism and
homosexuality.

Racism as
Stupidity. Racism needs to be
understood as a failure to correctly distinguish between information
about groups and information about individuals. Once this is
straightened out, we can see that the way to minimize racism is to
crush crime and trade in anti-discrimination law for freedom of
contract.

A Tenable
Grounds for Affirmative Action. The
standard justification for affirmative action -- to redress the
effects of negative racial expectations -- fails its own objective.
In a strictly merit based system, race would carry no information so
any tendency to conflate group and individual information would
disappear. Affirmative action undoes that ideal and gives race a
clear and unfortunate information content in the form of an
expectation of inferior merit. But there is a tenable grounds for
affirmative action in creating a cohort of accomplished blacks who
correctly analyze value. This justification depends on ridding he
university's curriculum of equalitarianism and the variety of
archetypical violations of moral reason that dominate the academic
left.

The last half dozen articles in this volume I
don't have synopses for yet but their titles (in the button menu
above) are suggestive.

While the earlier volumes contain
buttons to separate essays, readable in any order, the buttons here
are to the sub-sections of a single essay. The introduction explains
what the decentralized coordination of intelligence is and describes
the content of the other sub-sections.

This essay was written before I
discovered that others have also been working on the decentralized
coordination of intelligence but under a different heading. What I
have been calling a "rating engine" has apparently been under
development for many years by computer scientists under the name of
"collaborative filtering." Thus in addition to my calculational
model, a variety of other calculational schemes for projecting each
person's individual judgement are available. (Just net-search
collaborative filtering.) Whether my scheme adds anything to what has
been done before I can't say at this point. Likely not, since I only
did the obvious, but I had pretty good success in putting together
what seems to me to be a reasonably effective calculational scheme.
The other parts of the essay are made more relevant by the fact that
other research has already been done in the area. The decentralized
coordination of intelligence will arrive sooner than I could have
hoped and we can start putting it to the uses I advocate
here.